Development of high performance, high-current pulsed electron beam sources

As a core part, the performance of a high-current electron beam source is inevitably essential for high-power sources and accelerators. The attractive features are high-electric field vacuum interface, high quality high current density electron emission, and high peak thermal load collector, which are compatible with high repetition rate operations. This paper presents an optimized ceramic insulation structure with hold-off voltage pulse of 600 kV, 100 ns, and 5 Hz. Mechanisms and surface improvements are developed. Large-scale, well-aligned SiC nano-wires as high-current, pulsed electron beam emitters are explored. They show an superior advantage on cathode lifetime and emission quality. In addition the thermal control and cooling methods for a repetitively operated high current collector are gathered, and the specially designed device can work stably with a heat flux of 10¹² W/m². These efforts make solid contributions to the HPM sources for practical use. (authors)